I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

The New Google Maps Is A Social Network In Disguise

The new version of Google Maps, which debuted at GoogleGoogle I/O and will be rolling out via an invitation system in the coming weeks, is another leap forward for the cartographical gold standard. The design is cleaner and all screens—desktop, Android and iOS—now benefit from Google Now cards that pop up in appropriate contexts.

But just under the radar is the most ambitious attempt so far to make the Google+ social network relevant. Google has been on a mad integration binge of late, slapping plus signs on interfaces with abandon, but users find it hard to know why to bother. Matt Asay asks tartly on ReadWrite, “If Google+ Is So Good, Why Does Google Force It On Us?” Asay has a point, particularly about the obtrusive mating of Zagat and Google+ Local, but forcing is not quite the right verb.

The entire Google project has pivoted with its augmented reality Glass from a service of which you ask questions to a service that you query through your behaviors. In this respect, Google Maps is the ideal interface. Where are you? Here’s what you need to know. But it is also more than that, because what it shows you is based on all that it knows about you—which is a lot.

Google has been evolving personalized search for almost a decade, but personalization has become increasingly explicit to users in the past few years. The new version of Maps transfers this curation to the physical realm. Google makes what is, by now, a familiar claim for an app, that it “gets better with use.” Here is how the company describes this functionality: “As you search the map, star places you like and leave reviews, the map starts to adapt and can suggest things like restaurants you might enjoy or the quickest way home. In other words, the more you use the new Google Maps, the more helpful it becomes.”

So by using the map it becomes more useful—and it does this by collecting data as you traverse time and space, and by encouraging users to “star places you like and leave reviews.” And guess where those stars and reviews get collected? Yep, Google+. The idea is that through your actions, the map becomes more useful not only to you, but to the people in your Google+ circles.

Matt Asay quotes Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of Google+, who said at Google I/O, “I’m not sure that [the integration is] forced. I think there are some people who may have a misunderstanding of what we’re trying to accomplish…” What I believe they are trying to accomplish is in fact the first incidental social network. It happens, as John Lennon sang, while you are busy making other plans. This is not to say that your contributions of content to the network are coerced, but that sharing is not your primary intention—your own utility is.

What I see is not so much that Google is forcing people to use Google+ but that they are experimenting with ways for people to unobtrusively add to it through their own agency. In many ways this is more honest and straight forward than more explicit social networks like FacebookFacebook where you are encouraged to share in ways that are often not tied to immediate utility and sometimes even counter to ones own self-interest and better judgement.

Google Maps provides the ideal framework to capture this incidental content. You could imagine that you are making notes for your own future use, that you are, indeed, making the map better for you—and others just happen to benefit.

Of course, the main beneficiary is Google itself. These little scraps of content don’t add up to that much for the individual user, but in aggregate are another deep vein of location-based data that it can monetize. I don’t know if it is on Google’s “map,” per se, but it does have much of the infrastructure required to “reverse monetize” the content contributions of its users. This notion of a full accounting of the value of human data factors strongly in Jaron Lanier’s new book, Who Owns the Future? Look for a full interview with Lanier on this and other subjects next week.

This issue of monetization is important because it has been unclear what users’ motivations are to use Google+. David Glazer, director of engineering for the Google+ platform, says that it was invented as “a way for Google to get to know [its] users.” But as Asay points out, “This speaks to Google+’s value for Google, not its users.” The increased integration with Google Maps could change that—or not. It is very different to ask for information from the map than to contribute back to it. Beyond actually paying users for their content (which is hard to imagine how to implement, but in principle a good idea) Google needs to both make these contributions as frictionless as possible and increase people’s motivations to do so.

The fact is that once you place yourself in the context of Google Maps, you are creating a ton of content just through your own activity, aside from any explicit Google+ contributions. Assuming that Google holds on to as much data as possible about your sessions (and there is no reason to believe that it is throwing anything away, though I hope I am wrong about this) you create rating information incidentally. Let’s say you are in San Francisco and ask about Thai restaurants. Of the results Google Maps shows, you look at the cards for a few. That’s one level of rating, what catches your eye. But then you actually walk by one, stop briefly before spending an hour at the precise location of another. So Google now knows what you looked at at what you eventually selected, just as it does with its general search results. This is all objective data. You did look at this, you did eat there.

Where Zagat/Google+ Local comes in is to determine how satisfying, in fact, the meal was. This information than informs the priority of which restaurants are shown to you (and others) in the future.

But as useful as Google Maps is, and as useful as this additional personalization may become, the fact that Google is also an advertising company clouds our trust in the personalization. If Google is telling us that it is using a multitude of factors to calculate what to show us in a given context, how do we know that advertising is not one of the factors? Google’s algorithms are opaque to prevent people from gaming the system (easily), but this opacity also prevents us from really knowing which data is shaping our “filter bubbles” (to use Eli Pariser‘s wonderful term.)

The more personalized the Google experience becomes, the harder it is to know what that personalization is based on. In one sense, by contributing explicitly to Google+ you make this clearer by shifting the balance of data towards your own contributions. But what percentage of the data used to personalize a user’s experience comes directly from them anyway? No way to tell.

Once we acknowledge that we are in a feedback loop where use data is affecting display data it becomes hard to determine how astigmatic our perception of the world has become. A simple solution to this would be for Google to provide a simple toggle in all of their apps by which you could completely turn off personalization (and back on again) in order to have a constant “reality check.” I worry, for instance, that my own preferences may be hiding from me interesting things that would expand my world view.

This experience of toggling might be disconcerting at first, like the way Tony Stark keeps popping in and out of his armor in Iron Man 3, but in the end, I think we value our tools more if we know what they are doing for us. If users could see, explicitly, what their own Google+ contributions were doing to improve their Search and Maps experience, that would be motivating. But if opacity prevents that, all Google can do is to turn incidental data into implicit recommendations and make the process of actively contributing to Google+ as easy as possible.

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